Cruel joke of post-apartheid SA
ANC policy choices have made things more difficult for the poor black majority in many areas of life
● Living in SA is going to be very much a struggle through the 2020s. We face a huge economic, social and political crisis, arguably the worst in the history of this country. That we have this crisis in post-apartheid SA is an accurate indication of its magnitude, because it was not supposed to have happened. The mass resistance in so many ongoing township explosions speaks to the disjuncture between the expectations of black people after 1994 and the neoliberal policy regime the ANC imposed, which still dominates the economy a quarter of a century later.
The gravity of this crisis, which is largely the result of major economic, social and public policy compromises the ANC made in the 1990s, is manifest virtually everywhere in SA. Poverty, unemployment and social inequalities, which mainly affect the majority black working class, are starker today than they were under apartheid.
Unless the global crisis recedes and conditions improve, and the ANC makes some major changes which significantly and palpably improve conditions for this class, we are in for escalating trouble and instability over the next decade.
A big, if not the biggest, problem we’ve had since 1994 is that white people, in general terms, have not really had any major adjustments to make in their lives. Yes, many were probably affected by affirmative action and BEE policies, but overall it is estimated that in material terms white people are better off than they were under apartheid.
In his final state of the nation address, in 2008, former president Thabo Mbeki pointed out that the ANC had been kind to big business after 1994, understood primarily as white monopoly capital. He would know well. The point is that in economic and socio-material terms, not much has changed since 1994. In fact, in some respects things have worsened. Largely, the wealthy are still white and the poor black. In just about every social indicator the same pattern exists across SA. Even the cheap RDP houses and the places where they were built for black people reinforced the apartheid spatial and residential raceclass divide.
Jonny Steinberg usefully pointed out that the prospect of building cheaper black housing after 1994 in or close to white suburbia was edged out by white suburbanites: “The white middle classes of the late 1990s would simply not have allowed it,” he argues, pointing out that acquiring land for public transport which crossed white suburbia was hard enough, so imagine “the outcry if the purpose had been to house the poor”.
There was resistance from the white elite of Sandton, too, when they resisted the redistribution of city resources to the townships in 1995–96 before losing a related constitutional case. But it’s much worse today than under apartheid as a result of the increased power the ANC has given businesses in places such as Rosebank and Sandton in Johannesburg, following the neoliberal iGoli 2002 plan. Johannesburg now has city improvement districts, drawn from the US business improvement districts model, which have substantially increased the power of big business in the major cities.
This points to the fact that SA has in fact regressed in certain respects. For example, prepaid technology has had a devastating impact on black townships across SA as a result of policies the ANC adopted in the Municipal Systems Act of 2000. Not enough attention is paid to many areas of life in the “New South Africa” that have in fact made things more difficult for the poor black majority, who are further away today from the “right to the city” which Henri Lefebvre and other sociologists advocated in the 1970s and ’80s.
Given what apartheid represented for black people, the right to the city held even more relevance here than in Europe or the US. In fact, purportedly “postapartheid” RDP houses often accentuated the inherited racist segregation of housing, in which black townships were built on the barren periphery of the city, because instead of locating them closer to the city, they were extending outwards and further away from the cities.
In brief, for the poor black majority “post-apartheid” SA has seemed a cruel joke. I can hardly remember raw sewage running down township streets under apartheid, but it is a common sight under ANC rule. In this regard ANC rule has also totally messed up the Vaal River system. Corruption vied with blatant incompetence in the steady degradation of a place that was once a favourite for people from Johannesburg to visit and enjoy, picnicking and relaxing with families. That is no more.
Almost everything the ANC has touched in its rule — schools, health, municipal services and much more — has been run into the ground. The most powerful and richest city in Africa, Johannesburg, is a sad and depressing shadow of its past, with dirt strewn all over in certain parts of the city, including the CBD. Walk today into places like Hillbrow, a favourite of mine during the apartheid days, at your peril, especially at night. It has become dirty, dangerous and crime-infested, like so many other parts of the country.
Many or most people, especially from the “minorities” — and not only from the middle classes — regularly these days quietly condemn the atrocious decay of our cities over the past decade and the countless problems with the delivery of basic municipal services. What is less well known is that the unmitigated mess that ANC rule has led to, especially when seen alongside the load-shedding SA has suffered — at great cost to big and small businesses and particularly to poor households who don’t have generators — has served to create a searing and fully justifiable cynicism about the capacity of African people to govern the country. I firmly believe that the history of African people generally in SA and the specific history of the ANC to a large extent explain the mess SA has been reduced to under ANC rule.
When things like the unemployment crisis and the wanton corruption across the state and public sectors are factored in, there is currently a generalised and pronounced negativity about both the present and the future sweeping across SA, much of which the media has captured. The stream of immigrants from elsewhere in Africa and the flood of unemployed black people from rural areas into our cities have dramatically shot up over the past few years and will continue with negative consequences for not only the economy but for the ability of the state to continue providing the social grants on which many millions of the poorest people rely.
I often argue that so disastrous, and even tragic, has ANC rule been that one does not require detailed research to see it. Just keeping abreast with the newspapers should be enough to appreciate the calamitous magnitude of the current crisis. And the recent pandemic outbreak of the coronavirus has considerably worsened the already existing multiple crises we face. As with the climate crisis, it is the black working-class majority who are going to suffer most from Covid-19. In SA as elsewhere, Covid-19 has acted to widen existing social disparities and inequities, to deepen poverty and joblessness, and to sharpen the effects of hunger, malnutrition, anxiety, depression and domestic violence.